Monday, August 9, 2010

Nickelodeon Nostalgia, Part 3

Two posts about live-action shows and I still haven't mentioned You Can't Do That On Television. What a shame. Great sketch show, featured a young Alanis Morissette in later years, and introduced green slime, which became a long-running feature of Nickelodeon.

Anyways, for part 3 of my Nickelodeon nostalgia, I chose to write about game shows. I'm still holding off on cartoons, since that seems to be what everyone wants to see so I'll save the best for last.

Throughout it's years, Nickelodeon featured a unique variety of game shows. Here are a few of the shows I enjoyed in my childhood:

Double Dare - Nickelodeon's most remembered game show. Teams would answer trivia questions or dare each other to answer them. After being "double dared" to answer, teams could chose instead to perform the "physical challenge." The team with the highest score at the end had to run the obstacle course for additional money. The show had a number of spinoffs and retooled formats, including Family Double Dare, Super Sloppy Double Dare, and Double Dare 2000.

Nick Arcade - The opposite of Double Dare, in that it's the least remembered show on this list. Very few people I talk to seem to remember this show. Combining trivia, puzzles, and video games, the show consisted of teams of 2 competing to get to the Video Zone. Using blue screen technology, the team had to get through a video game world to defeat one of 3 villains. If you never saw the show, here's a video showing some teams competing in the Video Zone.

Legends Of The Hidden Temple - 6 teams (Red Jaguars, Blue Barracudas, Green Monkeys, Orange Iguanas, Purple Parrots, and Silver Snakes, I couldn't remember them all so I checked Wikipedia) were whittled down to 1 through games (crossing the Moat, trivia at the Steps of Knowledge, and the Temple Games), most of which were somehow connected to a myth or legend told in the episode. The remaining team then had to get through the temple within a time limit to find an artifact connected to the story without getting caught by the temple guards.

Figure It Out - A panel of three judges (all cast members from Nickelodeon shows) tried to guess the secret talent of the contestant. Two contestants played on each show, and each contestant got three rounds. The goal of each round was to guess a word and all 3 words were then used to guess the talent. What I remember the most about this show (other than my crush on the host, Summer Sanders) was that Danny Tamberelli, best known as the younger Pete on The Adventures Of Pete & Pete, was a panelist on what seemed like almost every episode.

GUTS - I watched this show often, but I found it the least interesting of the shows on this list. Young athletes competed in various events (a list of all the events can be found on the show's Wikipedia entry). The events changed from show to show, but the last event was always the Aggro Crag, a mini-mountain that the contestants had to climb. Most of the show wasn't that interesting to me, but I loved the Crag portion.

2 comments:

I remember all these shows and I admit to having a few flashbacks when reading over the Legends of the Hidden Temple paragraph... absolutely loved that and GUTS at the time. I'm also one of the few people that remember Nick Arcade.

That being said, I'm disappointed you didn't mention a couple shows, like Wild & Crazy Kids & What Would You Do? (I remember you mentioning Marc Summers in one of the prior posts).